This invention relates to a method and a system for generating and finishing documents.
To effectively communicate by way of documents, it generally does not suffice to compose a document, but it is to be ensured that the document reaches the person for whom the document is intended in a useful form.
When the document is a letter, for instance, it needs to be prepared for dispatch after being printed, for instance by folding the document and inserting it in an envelope. However, the document may also be a report or brochure, the pages of which are to be gathered and bound with a cover. Even if the document is an electronic document, some extent of finishing will be required to bring the document in a form suitable for transmittal and to provide it with an address.
For the dispatch of physical documents, and in particular postal items, it used to be, and still is, conventional to print indicia on a main document, which indicia represent finishing instructions, or refer to an address where finishing instructions are stored. When a package of main documents has been printed, these are transferred to an inserter system in which the indicia are read and the main documents are processed in accordance with the indicia. Examples of this are described in British patent application 2,202,660 and European patent application 0,265,192.
To avoid the necessity of printing indicia on main documents, U.S. Pat. No. 5,283,752 proposes to feed documents directly from a printing apparatus to a finishing apparatus. The instructions for printing the documents and the instructions for finishing the documents are sent out as a coherent set of instructions. Since in this way the order in which instructions are sent out is coupled to the order in which the documents are supplied to be finished, the printing of indicia for controlling the finishing of the documents can be omitted. More recent examples of integration of the printing and finishing of documents are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,628,249 and in international patent application WO 97/28972.
A problem with the integrated composition of instructions for printing and finishing documents is that if data processor systems from which the instructions for generating and printing documents are sent out work under different operating systems, different driving programs (drivers) which are designed to work under those different operating systems are needed. Also when newer versions of operating systems are installed, in many cases new versions of the driver programs are needed. Further, different driver programs are needed for driving different finishing apparatuses, while the large number of variants and configurations in which finishing equipment is available further enlarge the required variety of driver programs. Especially if it is desired to enable a large number of users to generate and finish documents by means of different apparatuses, this renders system management complicated. If it is also desired to process the instructions for generating and finishing documents, a further problem resides in the fact that many variants of the software for processing the instructions for generating and finishing documents will be needed as well, and when new versions of operating systems appear, updated versions will be necessary in many cases.